of every
species of governmental coercion. He had listened to Horne Tooke
perorating "hanging matters" at the Corresponding Society; he had seen
the "electric ruby" circulating at its dinners; he had witnessed the
collapse of Thomas Hardy's painstaking and methodical organisation. The
fruit of all these experiences was the first statement in European
literature of philosophic anarchism--a statement which hardly yields to
Tolstoy's in its trenchant and unflinching logic.

"Logic" is more often a habit of consecutive and reasoned writing than
the source of a thinker's opinion. The logical writer is the man who can
succeed in displaying plausible reasons for what he believes by
instinct, or knows by experience. There is history and temperament
behind the coldest logic. The history which set Godwin against all State
action, whether undertaken in defence of order or privilege, or on
behalf of reform, is to be read in the excesses of Pitt and the
futilities of the Corresponding Society. The question of temperament
involves a subtler psychological judgment. If you feel in yourself
something less than the heroic temper which will make a militant
agitation or a violent revolution against the monstrous ascendency of
privilege and ordered force, you are lucky if you can convince yourself
that agitation is commonly mischievous, and association but a means of
combating one evil by creating another. Godwin was certainly no coward.
But he was fortunate in evolving a theory which excused him from
attempting the more dangerous exploits of civic courage. His ideal was
the Stoic virtue, the isolated strength, which can stand firm in passive
protest against oppression and wrong. He stood firm, and Pitt was
content to leave him standing.

* * * * *

We have seen the first bold statement of the hope which the French
Revolution kindled in Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. We have watched the
brave incautious effort to realise it in the plans of the Corresponding
Society. In these crowded years that began with the fall of the Bastille
and closed with the Terror, it was to enter on yet another phase, and in
this last incarnation the hope was very near despair. To men in the
early prime of life, aware of their powers and their gift of influence,
the Revolution came as a call to action. To a group of still younger
men, poets and thinkers, forming their first eager views of life in the
leisure of the Universities, it